Cato Institute’s Indur Goklany has written a very important analysis
of the latest UN Summary of its yet to be published report on the
effects of global warming. The entire piece is posted at
EnvironmentNC.com and can be found here. The quote below captures one of his most important points.
“most of these impacts studies are inconsistent with the level
of economic development assumed by the IPCC?s emission scenarios and,
therefore, with their estimates of climate change. So we have the
curious situation where high economic growth drives large emission
estimates but the same level of economic growth is overlooked in
estimating impacts. All the IPCC emission estimates assume that the
world will become significantly wealthier between 1990 and 2100. Under
the poorest scenario (the A2 scenario), the average GDP per capita in
developing countries will be nine times higher in 2100 than in 1990 (in
real dollars), while under the richest-but-warmest? scenario (the A1FI
scenario), it will be 70 times higher than that for the average
inhabitant of developed countries in 1990, i.e., she would be wealthier
than her U.S. and Luxembourg counterpart in 1990). This means
developing countries should have much greater access to available
technologies to cope with climate change than they have today. Equally
important, technology would have advanced ? existing technologies would
be replaced by new and improved technologies and they will also be
cheaper (in real dollars). But generally these developments are not
fully considered.”
